Regular readers will know that Public Policy and the Past
is obsessed, absolutely obsessed, with the ‘don’t knows’ that you don’t usually
read about when you scan the headline figures in voting intention polls. So - as we head towards the finishing line of yet another national election (thank the Lord), maybe
it’s time to have another look at them.
There are three reasons for going back over this territory.
The first is a general point. The don’t knows form the background hum of where
the voters are coming in and out of each big camp – where the parties don’t
have to detach people from another tribe to rally them around their colours,
but only from a kind of weak attraction or half-remembered past association.
The second reason we’re obsessed with this point is more
specific, and it’s, well, once bitten, twice shy. When then-Prime Minister
Theresa May called a snap General Election in 2017, Britain’s Labour Party looked
completely dead and buried. Opinion polls put them twenty points and more
behind. A couple even gave the Tories double Labour’s vote. But then they zoomed up
and zoomed up in the polls. Eventually, they hit 40 per cent in the final vote.
Why? Well, partly because May ran the worst campaign in British
political history (at least since Labour’s in 1983), but also because there was
one key point most of us prognosticators had missed: the sheer number of people
who had voted Labour in 2015, but who were saying ‘don’t know’ at the start of
the 2017 campaign. They duly turned up and voted Labour when the chips were
down. We’re not making the mistake of leaving them out of account again.
The third factor behind this latter-day voyage around the
don’t knows? Well, the 2019 General Election is beginning to look a bit like the 2017 one. Not exactly, not precisely, but quite a bit. For one thing, both parties
are polling below the levels they reached during that campaign, and secondly,
Labour’s score doesn’t seem to be accelerating upwards as fast it did last
time.
But Labour are all the same gaining ground now, cutting
the Conservatives’ lead in a number of surveys to bare single figures. Not a
single national Voting Intention poll has yet implied a Hung Parliament, but
one might well soon (and, given normal variation, probably will) – sparking that
panic in Conservative ranks that we saw in 1987 and 1992, before their polling woes
abated.
So where are we with the don’t knows this time? Could
they come to Labour’s aid again, cutting the Conservatives’ lead from – on average
– maybe nine points, pushing it below the all-important six points which means thatthe Conservatives lose their overall majority? Well, the answer is the classic
academic’s cop-out: sort of, and sort of not. If we could chuck one of those
hands-in-the-air don’t know emojis at you, we would. Which is funny really. Okay,
maybe you had to be there.
Let’s have a scoot around the figures. We’ve gone through
the last eight pollsters to report (and put out their tables), and excluded Deltapoll
and Kantar, who don’t provide a crossbreak for ‘don’t know’ now and party
allegiance in 2017. That leaves us with the data from six companies –
Survation, YouGov, Opinium, SavantaComRes, Panelbase and BMG. That should be
quite enough to get a general impression of where the don’t knows are right
now. There are lots of ways you could cut this data (by gender, for instance, which suggests that Labour probably will benefit from a late move), but for brevity's sake here we'll focus on the 'past vote' category.
The answers aren't as encouraging for Labour (and for those
in search of a Hung Parliament) as they might be. There is a differential, in
that there are more ex-Labour don’t knows than Conservative, but it doesn’t
look like there are enough on their own to close that polling gap. Survation will give Labour people the most hope. That firm suggests that 7.6 per cent of Tory voters from 2017 are
now ‘undecided’, against a much bigger 13 per cent from the red team – though on
the other hand ‘refused’ amounts to 2.2 per cent of 2017 Tories and 0.6 per
cent of Labour voters from the last election, so we’re probably better off
saying 9.8 per cent Tory to 13.6 per cent Labour. If they all move back to their
prior teams, that’s worth maybe a point off the Conservatives’ lead.
Elsewhere, the news is less rosy for the Left. The latest YouGov poll has 10 per cent of 2017 Conservative voters saying ‘don’t know’, or
refusing to answer, and 13 per cent of Labour – with rounding, not much of a
better result than Survation’s for Jeremy Corbyn’s party, but still worse (for
reference, the split was 12 per cent to 18 per cent in the last YouGov poll
before the Commons voted for an early election). Opinium does have 16 per cent
of ex-Labour voters outside London saying ‘don’t know’, and only 9 per cent of
ex-Conservatives – a differential that might be worth a couple of points extra
to Labour – but with a pollster which shows than lagging 15 per cent behind
Boris Johnson’s party.
Lastly, there are three pollsters which show only a one
point difference between the don’t knows among 2017 Labour and Conservative voters:
Savanta ComRes, Panelbase and BMG. Those firms are showing 6 per cent of
Conservatives undecided against 7 per cent of Labour, 5 per cent and 7 per cent,
and lastly 9 per cent and 10 per cent. Not much comfort there.
What does this mean? It means that Labour can’t rely on
the don’t knows. It will, in all likelihood, get a bit of uplift from that source,
but not the three or maybe four points extra it needs to force Boris Johnson
into another round of Brexit hell – or even, perhaps, form a government
themselves. Labour will need to seek votes elsewhere. This will, of course, prove
a harder task.
Labour’s chances therefore now rest on squeezing the Liberal Democrats and the Greens even harder, since the real battleground seems to be
across the English Midlands and North, where the Conservatives are hoping to
win a string of seats that have been traditionally (and culturally) Labour.
That will be hard. Not impossible given a very volatile and uncertain electorate, but more difficult than convincing the don't knows. Labour have already pulled over a lot – and we mean a lot –
of those votes already (the Liberal Democrats are five or six points down from
their autumn peak). And those votes are unusual and sparse in many of
these areas – in Great Grimsby, for instance, which at this point looks fairly doomed as a
Labour seat. Hoping to convert almost all of Grimsby's remaining Lib Dems seems like a long shot.
So we’ve got a fix on the don’t knows. There aren’t that
many of them left: very likely not enough on their own to force the Tories below 322 seats
and into an effective minority. But Labour have climbed two ladders. They’ve definitely relegated
the Liberal Democrats into second. They’ve powered up with ex-Labour
returnees. Now they’ve released those gravity-defying rockets, the third stage is the hardest: get back Labour voters going Tory in small town England. Those
afterburners might fire. They might not. A lot hangs on what happens when
Labour presses that button.
